Table column heading - rule based highlighting?

[Inactive User]

Hi all,

Over the last few days I've been building a monster workflow to help with some monthly payroll reporting tasks. It's nearly finished, but I cannot for the life in me work out how to add the final cherry on top - contextual highlighting for the column headings based on their name.

See attached dummy data and picture below.

Essentially what I'm trying to do with the Table tool is:

• if column heading contains the string 'Add', then highlight that heading in a particular colour;
• if column heading contains the string 'Ded', then highlight that heading in another colour.

There will be a different number of additions and deductions each month, and each month the pay component after the 'Add/Ded' prefix is likely to change each month. I need to be able to highlight the additions headings in a different colour to the deductions headings as the table I'll be producing is huge and would be impossible to navigate without the different coloured headings.

Because the number of pay components in each category will change each month, I figured that I wouldn't be able to use a positional argument, and that I'd have to use a prefix with a 'contains' argument.

Full disclaimer, I'm still pretty much brand new to Alteryx - if you can think of a better, less goofy way to do this, I'm all ears - pls halp!

Any help would be much appreciated!

Thanks,

James.

[DavidP]

I don't think you can do this in the Table tool. Row and Column rules can be written to evaluate values in the data but not the field names.

I was thinking that you can perhaps output your data to Excel with the output data tool and write conditional formatting rules to change the colour of the heading cells, but I'm not clever enough in Excel to do that.

The reason I'm thinking this is that since, 2020.1 you can preserve the Excel formatting when overwriting a sheet, including conditional formatting.

[wwatson · Accepted solution]

This is a bit of a workaround but might do what you are looking for:

[Inactive User]

Thanks @wwatson I finally managed to get this to work last night using the below workflow. I guess it's a bit of a bodge, but it works great as a solution.

FYI - for some reason my post got duplicated when I originally posted it - here's the link to the other thread with another solution.